How Immigration Reform Could Help Alleviate the Teacher Shortage

Before each new
school year, there is a predictable barrage of news stories
lamenting the lack of qualified public school teachers, especially
in the hard-to-fill areas of math and science. This year, math and
science teacher shortages have been reported across the
nation, from Alabama to Nevada and from Texas to Utah.

There are a number
of potential ways to increase the supply of math and science
teachers, but one solution in particular shows great promise:
recruiting English-speaking math and science teachers from abroad
by expanding the H-1B visa program. Such a strategy would have a
number of benefits:

More children would
be taught by qualified teachers with degrees in the subject matter,
which is particularly important at the junior high and high school
levels.

Immigrant teaching
contracts could be structured to give local districts more
stability and flexibility in their teaching corps.

Foreign public
school teachers operating under the H-1B visa program would
represent a relatively low security risk compared to other
immigrants because they would be integrated into an existing
accountability system involving principals, superintendents,
and school boards.

The
Problem

The reported
shortage of math and science teachers is not a new problem, and it
is not localized in a handful of random areas. Indeed, this is
a persistent issue that has been reported on an annual basis
throughout the United States. The issue has become more
pressing in recent years because of the requirements for
"highly qualified" teachers under the No Child Left Behind
Act.

A smattering of
quotes from recent news articles outlines the problem:

Alabama:
"Officials
said they'll hire so-called 'long-term substitutes' for the
teaching slots that they don't fill by the first day of class."[1]

Utah:
"A teacher
shortage has been forecast for years. A couple of years ago, some
districts started school with substitutes and a few unmanned
classes. And right now, there aren't enough math, science, special
education and English-as-a-second-language teachers to go around,
state reports show."[3]

Nevada:
"Substitutes
will replace a shortfall of about 500 teachers in specialty areas
when students begin pouring into Clark County School District
classrooms in late August."[4]

While some researchers have questioned
whether the overall teacher shortage in the United States is simply
a function of the "revolving door" (i.e., teachers simply
changing jobs between teaching posts from one year to the next),[5]
growing evidence suggests that there is an actual shortage of
math and science teachers to fill open positions. In 2002, the
National Research Council suggested that the shortage is so
daunting that individuals with Ph.D.s should be recruited into
elementary and secondary classrooms to teach these technical
subjects.[6]

While there are a
number of potential reasons for the shortage, one of the more
plausible is economic: In the market for individuals with math
and science skills, the teaching profession generally does not
compensate as competitively as other fields. Even after adjusting
for the additional time off for summer vacation, entry-level pay
for technical math and science teachers can lag behind the
entry-level pay for technical disciplines in the private
sector. A recent editorial by The Indianapolis Star put it
bluntly: "A drug company chemist earning $60,000 a year would
be reluctant to take a $32,000-a-year entry-level teaching job."[7]

Alleviating the
Shortage

What can be done to
increase the supply of math and science teachers? One strategy is
to increase teaching compensation through incentive pay and thereby
lure current math and science professionals away from business and
industry. However, the union-based contracts found in many public
school districts typically do not allow incentive pay.

The heart of the
problem is the arcane way we recruit and prepare teachers, along
with the lockstep single salary schedule-which says a teacher
equals a teacher equals a teacher, no matter how desperately
society may need a certain skill set and no matter how well a
teacher performs in the classroom. That's senseless, yet it's still
the norm in the teaching profession.[8]

While an incentive
pay policy could be worth pursuing, implementing such a change
would require renegotiating thousands of individual school district
contracts, which would take a long time. Another strategy would be
to provide more incentives for current and future college students
to train for math or science teaching careers. However, this
strategy would not provide immediate relief because training a new
teacher typically takes four to six years.

A third strategy
would consist of recruiting qualified English-speaking math
and science teachers from abroad via the H-1B visa program. This is
not a new strategy. Many public school districts have used it in
recent years. One estimate suggests that as many as 10,000 foreign
teachers are currently working in the United States.[9]

Fast-growing areas
such as the Las Vegas area have a very high demand for new
teachers. In order to fill this growing need, Las Vegas will be
bringing in a large number of math and science teachers from abroad
this academic year.[10] Other school districts, such as Dallas,
are recruiting outside the United States to meet specific teaching
needs.[11]

While the government
typically does a poor job of gauging market demand for
international labor, the level of demand suggests that increasing
the number of visas issued to the FY 2003 level of 195,000 would be
an appropriate initial step. Local school districts could then draw
on the experience of the pioneering districts that have
successfully recruited teachers through the H-1B program in the
recent past.

In light of the math
and science teacher shortage, this strategy makes a great deal of
sense from a policy perspective for three reasons:

More children will
be taught by qualified individuals with subject-matter
degrees, which is particularly important at the junior high and
high school level. According to one report, about one-third of math
teachers and about 20 percent of science teachers in grades 7-12 do
not have a major or minor in their respective fields.[12] A
large corpus of research indicates that subject-matter knowledge is
key when teaching technical subjects, and secondary students
tend to perform better on standardized tests when they are taught
by a teacher who has a degree in the subject being taught.[13]

Immigrant teaching
contracts could be structured to give local districts more
stability in their teaching corps. H-1B visas are typically issued
for three years and can be renewed once for another three years.
Since working through the H-1B application process is an expensive
and time-consuming activity for the employer, the employing school
district would want to ensure that the time and effort spent on
international recruitment is worthwhile. Therefore, an
individual school district could structure its teaching contracts
for three years, eliminating the possibility of moving to another
school district or employer without compensation.[14]

As with any
immigrant, there is always a security risk; however, immigrant
public school teachers represent a very low risk for a number of
reasons. First, as public employees, their day-to-day actions would
be more highly scrutinized than the actions of typical
private-sector employees. All public school teachers are supervised
by a principal and/or other administrative staff at the
school. Additionally, a new teacher is often paired with a more
senior "mentor" teacher, who provides additional oversight. All of
the foreign teachers are ultimately accountable to
superintendents and school boards. Because of these multiple levels
of oversight, it would be difficult for a teacher to conceal ties
to terrorist organizations or other security concerns. Furthermore,
terrorists are unlikely to use this method to gain entrance
into the United States because of the time and effort involved in
learning math, science, and English.

Finally, because of
the close oversight, these teachers are much less likely to
overstay their visas as compared to foreign workers in other
occupations.

Immigration and
Flexible Labor Markets

While the current
math and science teacher shortage is a compelling reason to relax
the H-1B visa cap, the program should not be limited to math and
science teachers. Immigration policy in the United States should be
flexible, designed to respond to the needs of the U.S. labor market
rather than those of preferred industries or occupations.
Instead of limiting any expansion of the H-1B visa cap to specific
occupations, Congress should allow the marketplace to determine
which occupations are in demand.

For example, during
the computer technology boom in the late 1990s, more than half of
the H-1B visas were awarded to computer-related occupations.
However, after FY 2001, there was a dramatic shift away from
computer occupations in favor of the sciences (health, life, and
social) and education. The proportion of H-1B petitions for
computer-related occupations dropped from 58 percent in FY 2001 to
38.3 percent in FY 2002. During the same period, H-1B petitions
granted for education occupations increased from 5.3 percent
to 10.5 percent.[15]

While there is a
current need for more math and science teachers, this may not
always be the case. Indeed, the looming retirement of the baby
boomers will likely increase demand for health-related
occupations. The proportion of H-1B visas for health and
medical workers more than doubled from 3.4 percent in FY 2001
to 7.2 percent in FY 2003.[16]

Ideally, Congress
should allow the H-1B program to continue to respond flexibly to
U.S. labor markets.

Opposition to
Increasing the H-1B Cap

Even though raising
the H-1B cap would fill an obvious need, organizations such as the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE-USA) have
consistently opposed such a policy.[17] Generally speaking,
the IEEE-USA worries that bringing in cheaper labor in the form of
more foreign workers could displace U.S.-born
workers.

Even ignoring the
fact that the basic foundation of this argument is debatable, the
argument itself is wholly without merit for two basic
reasons.

First,
there is a
real shortage of teachers in the technical areas of math and
science, and teachers with less content knowledge are too often
teaching these subjects.

Second,
most public
school teachers work under some sort of collective bargaining
agreement that includes a standard pay scale for all teachers, with
teachers paid based on their years of experience and levels of
education. Therefore, an immigrant teacher brought in under the
H-1B program would earn the same amount as a U.S. citizen teacher.
If anything, schools have a small incentive to hire a U.S. teacher
over a foreign teacher because of the additional time and expense
involved in overseas recruitment through the H-1B visa
program.

What Congress Should
Do

To help address the
shortage of math and science teachers, among other reasons,
Congress should:

Expand
the H-1B visa
program from 65,000 to 195,000 visas per year (the level in FY
2003) and

Not limit
the increase
to any specific profession, thereby allowing the program to
continue to respond quickly to any shifts in demand in the labor
market.

Conclusion

Each new academic
year, public school districts face the daunting task of recruiting
adequate numbers of teachers in hard-to-fill specialties such
as math and science. Congress can help to alleviate this problem by
expanding the H-1B visa program, which would allow schools to
recruit larger numbers of qualified teachers from
abroad.

Research shows that
student achievement is driven by a number of factors that are not
easily affected directly by the schools. Increasing teacher
subject-matter knowledge, however, is a way for school districts to
affect students in a positive and measurable way. Policymakers
should focus on making sure that students are taught by
quality teachers, which means that math and science teachers should
have backgrounds and/or degrees in these subjects. Recruiting
quality, English-speaking teachers from abroad is one way to
achieve this goal.

Kirk A. Johnson,
Ph.D., is a Senior Policy Analyst in the Center for Data Analysis
at The Heritage Foundation.

[14]Naturally, the
immigrant teacher would want some provision in the contract to
allow the teacher to return home and be released from the contract
in the case of family emergency or some other bona fide
reason.

[15]U.S. Department of
Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics,
"Characteristics of Specialty Occupation Workers (H-1B): Fiscal
Year 2002," September 2003, p. 14. Notably, most of the education
workers brought to the United States via the H-1B program are
actually college or university faculty, but both the proportion of
college faculty and the proportion of K-12 teachers doubled between
FY 2001 and FY 2002. In FY 2003, one out of every nine H-1B workers
(11.1 percent) was a teacher at the K-12 or college
level.

Share

Each academic year, public school districts must try to recruitteachers in hard-to-fill specialties like math and science.Congress can help by expanding the H-1B visa program to 195,000visas per year and by not limiting the increase to any specificprofession, thereby allowing the program to respond quickly to anyshifts in demand in the labor market.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) says it's "a great way to start the day for any conservative who wants to get America back on track."

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